Master Fundamental Hacking Principles with Scheme

“If you don’t understand the principles, or if you are the kind of person who wants to be given a cookbook of what to do rather than to think creatively, or if you only want to work on problems that are pretty much like the problem you worked on last time, then this approach will not work for you. There are other approaches that will be more reproducible for a limited range of simple problems, but there is no better way than SICP to learn how to address the truly hard problems.” — Peter Norvig

Michael Harrison is looking to kick off an online SICP study group that will work through the MIT’s open courseware materials from September 5 to December 12. If you get stuck working through the difficult Lisp books on your own (or if you get distracted with other topics because you don’t have a study schedule) then you might benifit by joining such a group and having folks to bounce ideas off of.

Of course, you could always try working through the book by youself and post lame blog entries about how it’s so hard to get through it on your own… but come on… you’re not only going to irritate the online Lisp community with your inane ramblings, but you’re not going to get the feedback you need to truly develop your skills that way, either! (Get a clue… I mean… why don’t you wait until you have something to say before you start posting?!) So drop Michael a line and join the fun!

2 Responses to “Master Fundamental Hacking Principles with Scheme”

Thank you for the plug! Thanks to some folks you sent my way, our study group has six members now, so “registration” is closed. I’ll be blogging about it, though, and I hope to be able to post a fair amount of generally useful information about what we find difficult and what we find deeply interesting.

And I enjoy your posts. Please keep them coming. The more that gets put out there by smart committed people, the better for all of us wannabes.